We all make mistakes. Some of them have consequences that are more lasting than others are. When it comes to choosing a data storage solution, you can make many common scale-out mistakes. These mistakes can turn your new data storage infrastructure into the gift that keeps on giving. One of the biggest challenges when purchasing data storage is predicting how much storage capacity you really need. It is the most fundamental of considerations. Failing to account for future data growth will leave you scrambling to purchase additional storage sooner than you want to. However, it is just as detrimental to pay for more storage than you need in the near term, especially if that extra space is never used. Overpaying for storage today ties up capital that can be better utilized investing in current opportunities that can return value to your organization.

Scale-up vs Scale-out storage

One of the reasons that people make the mistake of paying for far more storage than they need is that they do not understand the difference between scale-up and scale-out storage. Most IT admins are familiar with the concept of scale-up storage even if they do not recognize the term. Also referred to as vertical scaling, it has served as the traditional architecture for block and file storage platforms. The typical system consists of a pair of redundant controllers that manage multiple shelves of disks. As your storage needs grow, you simply purchase more shelves. The concept sounds simple. While purchasing additional shelves does provide access to new disk technology and price efficiencies, your I/O performance remains throttled by the technology and resources of the stagnant controllers. And there is the fact there is a hard limit to how many shelves the controllers can manage. Once that shelf threshold is reached, you must purchase a new complete controller/shelf package. Then, there comes the day when you must upgrade the system. That is when you bring in the forklift and migrate all of your data to the newer system.

Scale-out storage is known as horizontal scaling and utilizes network-attached storage architecture. Rather than utilizing a series of controller-based shelves, scale-out storage consists of a series of interdependent appliances with each one serving as a complete system by itself. At the same time, you can configure these modules to act as a single cluster. Much like , you can add additional storage appliances like Lego blocks. Capacity of the cluster is automatically then expanded and new data is distributed. There is no need for separate controllers however as all of the required resources reside in the module itself. This means you get more than just added capacity. Additional RAM, CPU and networking resources can be leveraged to improve overall performance of the cluster.

Dell EMC Isilon

If the concept of scale-out storage sounds interesting, then you should become familiar with Dell EMC Storage. That is because according to IDC, Dell EMC Isilon is the industry’s #1 family of network-attached storage systems according to IDC in 2019. Some of the available choice in the Isilon family include the following:

• For those who want the high performance of an all flash array (AFA) there are the Isilon F800 and F810 models that feature up to 250K IOPS and up to 924 TB capacity per chassis
• Those who want the agility of a hybrid architecture will want to learn more about the Isilon H series that offers both SSD and SATA drives within a dense chassis design that can save you 75 percent in rack space
• For those seeking an archiving solution there is the Isilon A200 and A2000 units that are designed to safeguard data with encryption, data protection and efficiency at a lower cost

The right storage solution

Dell EMC has other storage architectures as well. If the need for speed is imperative, then Dell’s SCM persistent storage class memory line of primary storage solutions may be perfect. The PowerMax 8000 holds the title of the fastest storage array and delivers end-to-end NVMe storage class memory. It features 4 PB of effective storage capacity and a blazing 350GB per second bandwidth. For those seeking a simple next generation midrange storage solution there is the Dell EMC Unity XT family, built from the ground up to deliver unified storage speed and efficiency. Next generation means that it is built for a multi-cloud world and comes in both AFA and . In fact, Dell has a solution for just about every storage need, of any organization. What’s more, has solutions specifically designed for industries such as healthcare and media as well as defined workloads such as SAP and AI.

Connections Matter

Your data storage arrays do not work in isolation however. Your arrays can have the fastest I/O speeds available but without the equitable network infrastructure connecting them, your system cannot achieve optimum performance. It is a common mistake. Cheap connections can breed performance problems. If you currently depend on SANs for your storage needs, then consider the line of Directors and Switches. Connectrix directors and switches are designed to bring the best performance and scalability to your storage networks. Ensure high availability and support for Fibre Channel, FICON, FCiP and NVMe over Fabrics.

How WEI can help

Dell EMC has the storage solution to accommodate nearly any data strategy. Chances are that data strategy has changed quite a bit over the years and it may be time to revisit that strategy. Talk to the WEI data storage experts to ensure your data strategy and its supporting architecture will help drive your desired business outcomes. Storage can be complicated, confusing, and costly without the right strategy in place.

NEXT STEPS: Learn about these six scale-out storage mistakes to avoid in our video below.

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In order for developers to keep up with the speed of business, new innovations in storage, backup, and are being rolled out at a breakneck pace. To stay competitive, enterprises must adopt these new methods and technologies for faster restores and greater opportunities to leverage the true value of data across their organization.

When fast isn’t fast enough

In recent months, an increasing number of legacy disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) architectures are being replaced with faster, more modern flash-to-flash-to-cloud (F2F2C) technologies across industries. This change is being pushed by the need for more than just a backup: today’s enterprises need to rapidly restore critical data in the right contexts for a competitive advantage. Any time taken to backup or restore data can become a business challenge – and those that can do it fastest are better positioned to drive business value.

F2F2C is designed for the scale and use cases modern enterprise companies now require. Unlike tape-based library systems, F2F2C architecture helps organizations modernize their data protection while putting them in a position for future innovations depending on how they leverage their IT for business value.

What is Flash-to-Flash-to-Cloud (F2F2C)?

Flash-to-Flash-to-Cloud helps companies recover data rapidly, save money via cloud economics, and streamline data reuse for workloads and business priorities. It helps organizations address the demands of backup, analytics, artificial intelligence, and regulatory compliance. One study published by 451 Research declared the performance boost provided by this all-flash model to be “tenfold or greater,” and “one of the most significant changes in recent IT history.”

F2F2C’s strength comes from its hybrid approach to data availability and protection, featuring both on-premises flash for greater agility and efficiency, and safe, cost-effective public clouds for long-term storage and security. Flash-based solutions are increasingly being used for mission-critical applications, combined with the more affordable, flexible, and scalable storage model offered by the public cloud. Together, the combination allows for rapid recovery during regular operations and experimentation, with resources in the cloud readily available if on-premises resources are not.

How your enterprise can benefit from Flash-to-Flash-to-Cloud (F2F2C)

Compared to storage and recovery methods previously used by enterprises, F2F2C provides faster recovery times which allows more regularity and re-purposing for new business initiatives in next-generation IT environments. Other features include:

• Instant VM and granular data recovery on demand
• By deploying one platform, you can power all data-intensive workloads – from backup to

F2F2C supports the always-on enterprises of the future, anticipating that most environments will be virtualized and users will require instant recovery to meet both performance and customer needs. Increasingly stringent regulatory requirements will also be met with F2F2C’s scalability, reduced silos, and more opportunities to segregate environments.

Nearly 60 percent of enterprises moving toward a environment are leveraging both on-premise systems and off-premise cloud. Those among them to adopt strategies will enjoy improved local performance, more sophisticated management capabilities, greater availability, and reduced redundancy compared to their competitors.

Minimize downtime with Veeam Availability Suite and Pure Storage

recognizes the challenges faced by companies in enabling the “always-on enterprise” model that runs 24/7/365. To make things easier, Veeam is helping companies meet recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data.

, which includes , offers a new kind of solution that delivers the following features:

• High-speed recovery
• Data loss avoidance
• Verified recoverability
• Complete visibility
• and much more…

It does so by leveraging virtualization, storage, and cloud services that enable the modern data center to help IT organizations save time, mitigate risks, and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs.

When paired with Pure Storage’s end-to-end data platform, companies can begin to push the boundaries of what’s possible. The platform allows the consolidation of workloads without sacrificing performance while achieving 100 percent virtualization with confidence. Pure Storage enables scale from hundreds to thousands of VMs without disruption, and is completely managed inside vCenter.

provides fast and reliable block storage for your production data, as well as local snapshots for rapid restore, while FlashBlade enables you to store large data sets with a small data center footprint and restore them rapidly.

Work with WEI on upgrading your storage and recovery

Veeam Availability Suite with Pure Storage could be exactly what your business needs to maximize their data and push the boundaries of industry innovation. Contact WEI today to begin a conversation about building your custom F2F2C solution.

NEXT STEPS: Learn best practices for backup, recovery, and DR in this hybrid world of on-premises and cloud by reading one of our most popular white papers. Click the button below to get started.

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Speed is essential for your business on so many levels. In fact, speed is one of the determining factors of success today in a digitally transformed business environment where competition is now global. Speed plays a part in so many facets of business today, including:

• The speed at which you can create new ideas
• The speed at which you can deploy those ideas
• The speed at which you can measure the effectiveness of those ideas
• The speed at which you can respond to your customers
• The speed at which you can respond to opportunity

All of these require data. Today, we live in a data centric world in which data is actionable. This includes all types of data including structured data, unstructured data, sensory data, social media profiling, customer support emails, videos, and a whole lot more. This means the faster you can retrieve, create, process, and analyze your data, the faster you can react to circumstances and create value for your customers. If the required speed of data interaction has changed in the last ten years, then so has the demands of your storage infrastructure. Companies today need a storage system that can meet the stringent data mandates of today. You also need a data centric strategy for your enterprise in order to maximize on one of your company’s greatest strategic assets, your data.

roared onto the stage of the data storage industry a decade ago and has become an industry leader. The formula to becoming an industry leader is pretty simple, you change the model, and that is exactly what Pure Storage did with its . Gartner recognized Pure Storage as a leader in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays. Here are 6 benefits that Pure Storage can help make your business roar as well.

1. Pure Speed

If you need speed, then you need flash storage. A hard drive, on average, takes 10 milliseconds to begin transferring data. Compare that with one millisecond for flash storage. A savings of 9 milliseconds may not sound like a lot, but multiply that by the thousands of times a day your users access your storage infrastructure. This time savings is experienced in every bit of data that is saved and read each and every day. Reduced latency equals reduced costs and greater productivity.

2. Pure Design from the Ground Up

An all flash array is much more than a bunch of solid state disks. Simply retrofitting traditional storage architecture with SSDs will not garner the results you want. Only a purpose-built flash array solution specifically can procure the speed advantages that SSDs can deliver.

3. Pure Simplicity

Companies are rejecting proprietary solutions that are saddled with extended learning curves. Pure Storage solutions are designed for deployment and optimization in a matter of hours, not days. But simplicity is delivered in other ways as well. Because solid state storage has no moving parts, there is a reduced vulnerability surface, resulting in increased reliability and efficiency. The inherent simplicity also translates into a smaller footprint in your datacenter and reduced power consumption, all of which translates into a reduced TCO.

4. Pure Reliability

In a 24/7 world, even 99.999% (five 9s) availability is no longer enough. Pure Storage delivers an extra nine level of reliability for you. That is six 9s. This ensured availability to even its least expensive solution, the FlashArray//10, because reliability shouldn’t be a premium feature.

5. Pure Confidence in Your Purchase

If you aren’t confident as to how much storage you need, you aren’t alone. Enterprise storage demands are surging with the proliferation of data everywhere and determining the right size solution is often just a guess. Whether you buy too little or too much, the wrong decision can be . The Evergreen Storage solution is a revolutionary approach by Pure Storage that takes the worry out of buying storage. Evergreen is a subscription model, except the equipment can reside within your own datacenter. The Evergreen Right-Size Guarantee ensures that you have the minimum array capacity to fit your needs. If not, you get additional capacity. It also includes free upgrades to the next generation of controllers every three years. Evergreen was created to help reduce the risk exposure of making a purchase, and eliminating risk helps reduce costs as well.

6. Pure Intelligence

Gartner and other analysts predict that will be virtually pervasive in almost every new software product and service. AI is possible because of deep learning algorithms and data is the heart of these algorithms. AI adaption is about using your data to innovate. In order to do accomplish this, you need a high performance data solution that can keep pace with AI. Pure Storage has delivered an AI-Ready Storage Infrastructure that can help you in transforming your business.

Next Steps

Talk to a trusted IT solutions provider about how cost effective an all flash storage solution today can be. There are a lot more costs associated with a data storage solution than just the cost of the disks themselves. Software intelligence is helping reduce the cost structure of so many aspects of today’s modern enterprises. Data reduction, lower cooling and electrical costs, and a longer lifecycle are just some of the ways that an all-flash storage system from Pure Storage can deliver.

Continue reading about enterprise storage in our white paper, which provides tips for solving some common storage performance and capacity challenges.

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Enterprise Storage

When was the last time you gave your storage solutions an in-depth and thorough review? Whichever enterprise storage solution you use for your organization, it’s important to make sure that the brain of your operations is working smoothly and data is flowing where it’s needed, when it’s needed. An enterprise storage checkup can determine the performance of an storage system and reveals how strong of a fit the system is for your enterprise.

For organizations looking into modernizing their storage infrastructure, here are 9 things about Nimble storage that are worth noting.

1. Nimble Storage is simple to manage. (You don’t need to be a storage admin.)
   Nimble Storage was designed for ease of use. The arrays are automated and simplified. There’s no need to know raid levels, drive types, and what to put where. The array is designed to know these requirements already.
   
2. Nimble Infosight pays attention.
   It details not only your array, but it also monitors the health of your virtual environment. Infosight will warn you if a VM is performing poorly and IT administrators are notified before they would otherwise realize something is wrong. It can suggest when to add more storage, more cache, or more performance proactively. Reports can be generated as needed for presentations or for backing up requests.
3. Dedupe support.
   Nimble’s latest OS (5.0.3) now supports dedupe and compression on spinning disks. Get the most out of your investment. This software is even backwards compatible for older models, so you can benefit more from your storage investment. It enables IT teams to pack more data into a smaller space to save power, cooling, and space charges.
4. Nimble is both a scale up and a scale out ²¹°ù°ù²¹²â.Ìý
   It is easy to add shelves and drives or combine up to 4 arrays to increase your storage. This gives you the most flexibility in storage expansion and design.
5. Less than 1 minute hold time before you reach a level 3 engineer
   Nobody likes to waste time on the phone with level 1 support. Get to the issue fast and a resolution faster.
   
6. 86% of opened cases are auto closed with a solution.
   Nimble Storage provides simple and fast support. A lot of issues have already been seen in other user’s environments. Nimble support correlates these issues and can resolve them quickly with known/proven solutions. Nimble will also proactively notify you of issues you may encounter so that you can avoid downtime or impacts to your environment.
7. Tightly integrates with Veeam.
   This provides the most functionality with your backups. Veeam integrated snapshots, replication awareness, and proven performance allow your backups to complete quickly and allows you to use your backups for more than just restores. You can spin up bubble environments to test upgrades/updates or new applications without impacting your production environment.
8. All flash arrays support triple parity+.
   You can lose up to 4 drives without a loss of data! One of the most resilient arrays on the market with a 6x9s uptime.
9. Quick setup and one of the fastest times to provisioning. Our engineers can install and configure your array in no time. This allows you to provision the storage in your environment quicker and expand your environment faster so that your business can be more agile. No more waiting weeks for implementation.

For many organizations, Nimble Storage is an essential tool contributing to digital transformation and a solution to consider in data center modernization initiatives. It brings benefits to a wide range of environments and is flexible enough to play well with many other technologies. Talk to WEI, an IT solutions provider and HPE Platinum Partner, to see if Nimble aligns with your enterprise storage needs and how it fits in your IT environment.

Next Steps: Do you want to get the most value from your storage investment? If so, download our white paper, “,” to learn whether your company could benefit from an enterprise storage checkup.

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The face of data storage in enterprise data centers has changed in the past few years with the rise to prominence of solid-state, or flash, storage. This advancement of storage technology has now become so widespread among enterprise IT infrastructures around the world that 49% of organizations surveyed by the indicated they already use flash technology, and another 38% have made plans to or are currently investigating the technology.

Flash or solid-state drive technology is seen commonly in devices from smartphones, laptops, and servers, but it has also revolutionized the storage array landscape. Of the organizations polled by ESG 63 percent reported using solid-state drives in storage subsystems today, 35 percent in all-flash arrays, and 30 percent as extended cache within hybrid storage systems.

Flash storage has increased in adoption due to its operational and economic benefits, ESG highlighted several of the following benefits from the survey respondents:

• Improved application performance
• Reduced power consumption
• Improved resource utilization
• Improved TCO
• Reduced operational expenses and improved SLAs

Better application performance isn’t flash storage’s only “plus”. Flash also brings significant decreases in power consumption over its HDD counterpart, dramatic reductions in rack and floor space, and features like data compression and deduplication that significantly maximize a healthy flash storage investment. Then there’s the decreasing cost per gigabyte of enterprise flash storage which makes it more accessible for many organizations. The timing on that is perfect because we are seeing more and more enterprise organizations struggle with accurately projecting storage needs with the exponential amount of data tied to critical applications and systems.

Data protection must adjust to cover exponential growth

Performance is a key benefit of a flash-based environment, and nearly 60 percent of current and potential users identified enhanced performance as a factor in their decision to deploy solid-state storage. But in an all-flash world, IT can’t let . By redefining the game for data storage, flash has also redefined the game for data protection by placing new requirements on the traditional mandate of speed and agility of recoveries, reliability of backup and recoveries, and increased speed or frequency of backups.

As far as features, flash storage is held to the same expectations of any enterprise environment including:

• Data deduplication for optimized storage footprint and TCO
• Application-consistent backups and hypervisor support
• Scalability
• Orchestration and automation of recovery processes
• Support of public and private cloud layers

These functions must be performed with no impact to production workloads. Data capture with tight data source storage integration is expected, as is data movement with direct data paths from primary to secondary storage. This is a commitment HPE has been working on with recent additions to its portfolio.

HPE Nimble and their 6-nines promise

According to the HPE website, is “smart enough to make 86% of problems disappear.” It leverages flash storage and predictive analytics to eliminate the app-data gap and guarantee 99.9999 percent availability.

Every second, HPE InfoSight analyzes and correlates millions of sensors from all of its globally deployed systems. As it works, it learns to predict and ultimately prevent the most common problems that can cause bottlenecks. In fact, ESG has quantified a 79 percent drop in operational expenditures related to costs and time spent managing storage.

Nimble Storage includes cloud native integration with AWS, Azure, and cloud-native API’s. () It is positioned as a very efficient family of arrays, with the ability to store more data per terabyte of flash storage than other all-flash arrays. It can also be combined with HPE Nimble Cloud Volumes for full cloud integration.

HPE Nimble delivers on more than just the sampling of benefits above. In case you missed it, HPE Nimble earned a spot in the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid State Arrays.

What does flash-integrated data protection look like?

(RMC) software integrates HPE 3PAR StoreServ and HPE Nimble All Flash Arrays with HPE StoreOnce Systems to provide a flash-integrated snapshot, replication and backup service that augments traditional backup approaches.

HPE RMC delivers the end-to-end data protection and rapid recovery that your applications demand, from the data center to the cloud, whether you use on-premises flash storage for its low latency and security, cloud for its flexibility and cost benefits, or if you employ a hybrid IT approach to achieve your right mix of storage. HPE RMC has proven benefits, such as:

• Fast – Deliver on SLAs with fast, non-disruptive, application consistent backup and recovery
• Efficient – Eliminate cost and complexity of traditional backup approaches with direct backup from HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble to StoreOnce
• Reliable – Protect applications with the performance of snapshots and the protection of backups
• Simple – Empower hypervisor and application owners to control backup and recovery direct and seamlessly from their preferred native interfaces

HPE RMC also delivers rapid, non-disruptive backup and online recovery. The solution eliminates the backup window and enables rapid online recovery with fast, non-disruptive, application-consistent snapshots. ( This reduces the backup impact on your applications, which supports the performance of your HPE 3PAR and HPE Nimble flash deployment. HPE has really taken a holistic approach to the storage needs of the modern enterprise with these offerings, and WEI’s team of storage experts can help you determine which of these solutions (if any, or all, of them) are the right fit for your enterprise’s storage portfolio.

The takeaways

Flash storage is delivering on its promises of improved performance and efficiency, effectively changing storage and IT infrastructure in the data center as we know it. But it has also created a new set of requirements – particularly for data protection. In order to keep up the benefits delivered by flash technology, data protection processes have evolved to keep up with the sheer amount of data and speed at which it is being handled in storage.

HPE’s Nimble uses predictive analytics to recognize and resolve potential problems before they require support, and has cut expenses related to human management of storage by nearly 80 percent. With numbers like those, it might be worth taking a closer look. Contact the storage experts at WEI to learn how HPE Nimble, and HPE’s portfolio of storage and data protection solutions, can fit in your IT environment.

NEXT STEPS: Are you exploring flash storage or running into challenges managing it effectively? Check out our free download below to help you ensure you are making the right investment with flash storage.

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• • IT as a service (ITaaS)
  • Efficient use cloud applications
  • Mobility, virtualization, and infrastructure modernization
  • Lower costs and risk

5 Reasons to Choose Nimble for Your Hybrid IT

1. Flexibility and Hybrid Storage. When HPE purchased Nimble Storage, they didn’t just acquire all-flash tech. Part of the acquisition also included Nimble hybrid storage, a predictive hybrid flash array. By using predictive analytics combined with hybrid flash performance, scalability, and availability, the Nimble Adaptive Flash array operates at an all-flash service level and storage system. It also has the ability to balance high performance at an “auto flash” service level while at the same time operating at a “minimal flash” service level, which gives your enterprise better optimization.

2. No Disruptions as You Scale and Grow. One of the beautiful aspects of Nimble architecture is its ability to scale-up seamlessly to grow the performance and capacity of an array without putting a halt on your enterprise. Attaching additional storage shelves allows Nimble to grow the capacity of a running system, while upgrades to the array’s controller modules scale the overall performance. Nimble also has the ability to scale-out in one managed cluster without disrupting processes. It joins together up to four arrays to build a scale-out cluster, which achieves both linear performance and capacity scaling.

3. Backup and Secondary Workloads. If your enterprise is looking for a solution that allows you to put your backup data to use, Nimble provides you that option. As a single device that is optimized for secondary storage tasks such as backup and disaster recovery, its flash performance also allows you to do real work with the secondary data sets. The solution instantly backs up and recovers data from any primary storage, and it saves time and space with always-on duplication. Flash performance also allows data protection administrators to perform instant restores, validate backups and more.

4. Data Security and Disaster Recovery. With more data being used with less infrastructure, thanks to the ability to manage large workloads with optimized consolidation, it is extremely important secure that data from external threats. HPE’s ability to mitigate risk in a hybrid IT environment is a major strength of its flash storage offerings. With its integrated data protection, risk is minimized in a hybrid IT environment through fully redundant hardware architecture and by using the speed of flash to protect workloads in .

5. Cloud Integration. Nimble Storage offers a range of “Predictive Flash” storage which offers simplicity and reliable performance, as well as cloud Essentially, it serves as a “flash fabric” across primary flash, secondary flash, and multi-cloud storage. The physical systems, together with public cloud storage service, provides a convenient way to establish and run the flexible data storage required by hybrid IT. This allows a free flow of data between onsite arrays and the cloud.

As tech continues to grow and evolve, the flexibility, adaptability, and optimization that flash storage solutions (such as Nimble) provide is going to be a necessity to keep up. Hybrid IT is about using a mixture of elements that work for your enterprise, an infrastructure solution that will no doubt be prominent for the foreseeable future. For these reasons, including the five listed above, hybrid and flash storage are a perfect match!

Still not sure you should invest in HPE’s Nimble Storage Solution? Contact WEI today for a personalized look at your enterprise’s hybrid IT strategy to find out how HPE Nimble can be used to your advantage.

Are you implementing a hybrid IT strategy? Are you running into challenges?

Check out our white paper, Overcoming the Challenges of Implementing a Hybrid IT Model, to best prepare for any unforeseen challenges.

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What storage solution can be found in both the enterprise and personal cell phones? Flash storage. It’s a flexible and compact option that does away with the traditional Hard Disk Drive (HDD). While it is becoming more common to see flash in both the enterprise as well as consumer electronics, the similarities stop there. In this article, you will discover how is not just any other solution on the market and why you should choose their secondary flash array.

What is Flash Storage?

is a form of electrically erasable programmable read-only memory, or EEPROM; however, it is different than traditional EEPROM because it erases blocks of data rather than deleting one bit at a time. Unlike dynamic RAM (DRAM), standard EEPROM and flash are nonvolatile memory, meaning power is not needed in order to save your enterprise’s data with integrity.

As a solid-state storage option, there are no moving mechanical parts involved with flash storage, which reduces power consumption. And, since flash drives have no mechanical limitation for file access, they are able to retrieve information in microseconds, unlike hard disk drives which take milliseconds.

Nimble’s Secondary Flash Array Storage for Your Enterprise

Nimble Storage is built around reducing risk, improving reliability, and maximizing the productivity of your infrastructure and IT teams, while also giving your enterprise a competitive edge and making employees’ jobs easier.

Nimble’s secondary flash array is specifically optimized for the backup/disaster recovery and copy data management use cases. A flash cache provides performance to support recovery and also runs dormant workloads. Nimble’s snapshot-based replication allows fast, efficient data movement between Nimble’s all-flash arrays, hybrid flash arrays and secondary flash arrays. This secondary flash array also has a beefed up CPU and DRAM so inline compression and deduplication can be performed without impacting storage latencies. While most hybrid flash arrays in the industry do not do well in deduplication without impacting performance, it is a key component to Nimble’s secondary flash array.

Nimble’s triple parity plus RAID enables enterprise-class data integrity, no doubt a critical feature when optimizing workloads that have a high degree of data redundancy. You can expect, on average, an 18:1 data reduction ratio when used with Veeam.

Since it is optimized for snapshot-based backups to a flash tier, Nimble’s secondary flash array removes backup windows with zero impact to your host systems and with its excellent integration with Veeam in particular, secondary array flash use is particularly easy. The flash tier also provides near instant restores and offers the ability to run production or other workloads at full speed on space-efficient copies of the data. Workloads can include:

• Reporting
• Testing and development
• Quality assurance
• Analytics
• More

Further, with this type of storage you have the ability to test and verify backups for peace of mind. Replication enables disaster recovery configurations that leverage not only all-flash arrays, but also hybrid flash arrays, and ultimately public cloud environments. The platform also provides solid integration, with Nimble Cloud Volumes enabling an enterprise-grade multi-cloud storage service with the full feature set of the NimbleOS and a flexible “pay as you go” use model.

Nimble’s secondary flash array also brings other key Nimble features with it, such as Timeless Storage and cloud based predictive analytics. Through Timeless Storage, all Nimble arrays come with a , all-inclusive software licensing, flat support pricing, no-forklift upgrades, and an option to receive a free faster controller upgrade after three years. InfoSight uses cloud based predictive analytics and machine learning to anticipate and prevent problems before they impact the business.

Final Thoughts on Nimble’s Flash Storage

Nimble’s flash storage, specifically its secondary flash array, offers your enterprise the security of storing your important data without the need for power and the ability to retrieve that data in microseconds. It also reduces downtime with the the ability to run production or other workloads at full speed on copies stored on the flash drive.

Ready to adopt flash storage? You might want to read through our tech brief, before you make a purchase. We certainly stand behind the move to flash storage, it’s the future of storage and offers monumental benefits, but our experience has showed that a flash storage decision is not one you make in a snap. One of the biggest mistakes companies make with a storage purchase is that they undersized it.

Talk to our storage team about your goals for flash and how you plan to use it; and we can help ensure you make a purchase that supports your needs now, and the future.

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